Regular contributor Mac ruminates on the world of travel & some of his adventures along the way J This time round he answers some questions on his various travels and what has stuck in his mind along the way…

This time round he visits Tonga via reading – You Cant Get There From Here : A Year On The Fringes of A Shrinking World by Gayle Forman. Below are some of the highlights that caught his attention…

According to the larger world Tonga is always mid eighties and partly cloudy even when the rain is hammering the palm trees and the waves are pushing twenty feet. Tonga tags itself as “The Land Where Time Begins” being the first nation falling west of the international dateline. A more appropriate moniker would be “The Land That Time Forgot”

English is widely spoken in Tonga but many Tongans openly dislike Westerners When Nick and I had taken an exploratory bike ride around the island a few days earlier every other person we passed had yelled Falangi, a derogatory term meaning “white person. A few kids had even thrown rocks.

Quite a few Tongans I had met treated me with cool disdain or even outright aggression an anti Westernism I might have expected but actually would not experience in places like Cambodia or Tanzania. In those countries there was ample reason to hate Westerners – war, colonization, silly tourists with corn rowed hair. But Tong had none of that. It is the only South Pacific nation never to have been colonized and is one of the few Polynesian islands that is rarely visited by tourists

Ikale beer in Tonga – I turned right at the expat hangout of choice the Billfish Bar cutting through the suburbs full of wood houses each with a pig or two rooting in the yard. Tongans keep pigs like Americans keep dogs except they eat them.

Enuff, Enuff. Mac